The Kubernetes Checklist for Teams Without a Platform Team

Most Kubernetes advice assumes you have a platform team: specialists who own upgrades, ingress, security policies, and the 2 a.m. pages. The teams I am writing for usually have three to ten engineers, one of whom “knows Kubernetes,” and no dedicated platform team. They depend on a cluster that nobody fully owns. I work in enterprise environments where platform teams are large and everything is process. This article is the opposite exercise: what is the minimum discipline a small team needs to run Kubernetes in production—and what enterprise baggage should it refuse to copy? The question that matters more than any tool Before any checklist: who owns the platform after the migration is finished? Not “who set it up.” Who owns upgrades next year, certificate renewals, the CNI version, and deprecated APIs? If the answer is one person's name, you do not have a platform. You have key-person risk with YAML on top. If the answer is “nobody, really,” Kubernetes is invisible operational debt accumulating interest. The rest of this checklist exists to make that ownership small enough for a small team to carry. For each item, score 0 if it does not exist, 1 if it exists but is informal or untested, and 2 if it is documented and tested. The purpose is not to produce a flattering number. It is to expose the next few conversations the team needs to have. 1. Deployments: Git is the source of truth Treat Git as the source of truth for workloads and cluster configuration, including temporary fixes. Use one reconciliation path—for example, Argo CD or Flux—so production changes are reviewed and reproducible. Keep emergency access, but reconcile every emergency change back into Git. Define and test a rollback path for every service. A Git revert is useful only if your delivery process can deploy it safely. This converts your cluster from a mystery into a diff. Every other practice gets easier once “what is running?” has an answer. 2. The rollout basics that prevent late-night incidents R